Deutsche Bank’s AI Digs Through ESG Disclosures
Fast growing interest in the environmental, social and governance (ESG) aspects of investing has led to a data explosion over the past decade. In the US alone, the growth has been spectacular: four-fifths of American companies now publish reports on corporate social responsibility – quadruple that of seven years ago – and in general, the amount of data reported to the SEC has increased five-fold since the financial crisis. While we enthusiastically welcome the increased transparency and trust more data can bring, sifting through all that information is difficult, and investors seem to have particular trouble translating ESG information into investible data, especially as so much of it is unstructured textual, qualitative disclosure, rather than comparable quantitative data.
